BEST AMERICAN ESSAY - Columbia University

Note: This essay appeared in the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 anthology, edited by Dave Eggers, and was originally published in The Georgia Review.

Shipwreck

And the Devil bubbled below the keel: "It's human, but is it Art?" ? Rudyard Kipling

Katrin lies in front of me face-down and covered in plastic. A Chinese man in his twenties moves back the film to expose her hand and carves a little slit down her thumb. Moving quickly, he peels the skin back with tweezers and a scalpel, and I can see the thick flesh at the heel of the palm. A thin layer of fat as yellow as the fruit of a mango sits on a membrane above the muscle, and with a quick cut and pull it cleaves cleanly away. He flicks the globule of fat into a little metal bowl. Within a few minutes, the hand is skinned enough that I can see a strip of ligament running from a fingertip to the wrist. She might have been a typist ? the ligament is thick and developed, as if she relied on it. She might have been a writer. A journalist. A pianist.

Katrin is destined to be a part of Body Worlds ? a set of exhibitions traveling through Europe and Asia, for which human corpses are made into mummies called "plastinates." Unlike the mummies of Egypt, however, these plastinates are perfectly preserved. Through a complicated process, the fluids in the body are replaced with a polymer. Thus, a body can look much as it did upon death, hypothetically for thousands of years. Standing in the dissection hall in northeast China, watching Katrin's hand being flayed, I notice the fingerprints peel off the pads of each finger in quick slips. Dr. Gunther von Hagens, a German anatomist, invented plastination in 1979 and immediately began taking volunteers ? people willing to have their bodies plastinated after death.

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Katrin was one such volunteer. The worker holds up a fingerprint for me, transparent by the light of the window. Here in Dalian, Plastination City processes hundreds of bodies each year.

A few weeks ago, my brother emailed me from London with a picture of his new girlfriend and a hyperlink: . He was heading to China to write an article for Science Magazine, and wondered if I wouldn't like to come along as a "poet in residence." (He's always concocting ways for me to tag along ? if I weren't busy finishing grad school, in a few months I'd be on a ship in the Indian Ocean trying to harpoon a sperm whale. Ya-hey, Ahab.) Having never been to Asia, and curious about China's frenzied pursuit of capitalism in the "new economic zone" of Dalian, I immediately agreed to go. I didn't check the link he'd sent me for another week. That's when I saw a child's head made entirely of plastinated veins.

They'd pumped resins through the circulatory system of the young body and then dipped the whole thing in acid ? only the blood vessels were left. It looks like a faint red cloud of a child. A whisper and hush. I immediately checked out a copy of Grey's Anatomy and snagged a plane ticket on the cheap. When you go scuba diving, you fall into the water head-first and backwards. I think this was something like that.

A worker slides a scalpel under the lip of Katrin's thumbnail and pulls. Body Worlds is "anatomical art" ? a tradition started in the middle ages when artists such as Andreas Vesalius and Michelangelo explored the aesthetic of anatomy. Dead bodies were depicted as partially flayed nudes, gracefully presenting their own organs. This tradition has long since fallen out of fashion, and anatomy has been relegated to anatomical museums, featuring jars of floating organs or virtual reality tours of body systems. Now, as if walking out of history, von Hagens has taken the

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Renaissance nudes and brought them to life. But his nudes actually are nudes ? every body on display was once a living, breathing individual. This has shocked the people coming to the London exhibition. Unlike the Renaissance audience, accustomed to plagues, public hangings and vivisections, we rarely encounter death in person.

Dr. von Hagens is away in South Korea at a new exhibition in Seoul. So, armed with a notepad, a translator, and Christine ? the very press-shy manager of Plastination City, a tall blonde northern German with somewhat menacing teeth ? I find myself here in the dissection hallway around mid-morning, and embark on a journey in which I will see more dead bodies than I have ever seen in my life. My brother is off pursuing photos. I tuck my stomach into a tight little corner and order it to keep quiet.

The Body Worlds website keeps a running tally: before I left California, the wait to get into the London exhibit (in a warehouse on the outskirts of town) was around 2 hours. To date, over 13.5 million people have gone through the doors. But why are we coming? What do we want from Katrin? All she has to offer is muscle and teeth, the white hair of nerves, the swollen sack of the heart ? the shipwreck of her body. Yet there's no lack of interest in her. Thousands of people have walked through row after row of corpses in a peculiar hush, like a procession in a church. To try and find out why we keep coming to these exhibitions, I need to know just what kind of art this is. If these were simple nudes, I wouldn't need to come halfway across the planet. The nude is familiar territory, with a pedigree going back thousands of years written in stone and patina. But these are not simulacra. Can a dead human body be a piece of art "about" the human body?

I look down at death for answers. One worker begins stripping the skin from Katrin's calf. It feels a little like staring down from a great precipice ? a dizziness and

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exhilaration and the simultaneous desire to jump and to run back to the car. As the shinbone hovers behind fat and membranes, as a caterpillar shows through its chrysalis, I scramble back to what I know about art. Artists have used parts of the body in their work before ? urine and blood, for instance. Spit. Artists have used animal bones in their art, even. But no one's taken an entire human body and turned it into raw material.

It's been said that every work of art has a subject. One might say that Picasso's Guernica is about the horror of war, or that Monet's Jardin de Giverny is about the beauty of peace. Even Duchamp's ubiquitous urinal had a subject ? the piece was about Art and Intent. Watching the skin gradually peeling off Katrin's extremities like the skin of a fruit, I know that the subject of these pieces must have something to do with the body. But I'm not sure that the subject of a sculpture can be itself. Michelangelo's David certainly isn't "about" marble. So it seems unlikely that the subject of von Hagens' cadavers is the nude. If these are indeed artworks, what is their subject? When asked, Dr. von Hagens has answered mysteriously, "the body is the ship of the soul."

A man scrapes tissue off his gloved finger on the side of the metal table. The workers joke with one another in Chinese. I know they're joking because they're laughing. I don't speak a whiff of Chinese. I don't ask my translator because people should be allowed to go about their business without always explaining it to the American. This feels suspiciously like reading Pound's Cantos.

When asked about the aim of his exhibitions, Dr. von Hagens has said humans "reveal their individuality not only through the visible exterior, but also through the interior of their bodies as each one is distinctly different. Position, size, shape and structure of skeleton, muscles, nerves and organs determine our face within." But then, in these exhibitions, he purposefully changes the position and structure of these bodies to

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reveal something ? we normally can't see organs through a wall of muscle, so he cuts a window in the muscle. There are buckets of spare organs across the room ? is the "face within" still the same face without its nose? Eyes? What if the face were rearranged like a Picasso? And what of this face belongs to the conscious individual that once resided in the body ? the "ship" that carries us? His metaphors feel slippy. I've come to Dalian, a port town on the north rim of the Yellow Sea, to find out what happens when a human body becomes a work of art, and what that art could possibly be about.

While we stand around Katrin's corpse, Christine begins rattling off the four steps of plastination. "First, the bodies are dissected to remove the skin and fatty layers." The metal bowls positioned around the table are filling with yellow fat. I notice one worker has a bowl perched in the hollow below Katrin's pubic bone. The fat wobbles with each addition. "After dissection, the bodies are further defatted in acetone. Once the body is done in defatting, they are impregnated with polymer." The bowl in Katrin's crotch leans worriedly to the left. "For the final step, the bodies are positioned in various gestures, and given a gas cure to harden the polymer." The worker moves the bowl down between Katrin's knees. I look back up at Christine. "The tour will follow these steps, in order, so that you will see bodies at each stage of the process." She smiles, looking for recognition.

I tuck my notepad into my jacket. "Yes. That sounds lovely." Plastination City is composed of two drab concrete buildings and two bunkers high up on a hill in Dalian's new technology park. The tour begins in the dissection hall. At the far end, two men insert mung beans into the cracks of human skulls, which they will water until the skull cracks along its natural fissures. Winter light filters in through the blinds. Stretching back in double rows from the skulls, there are over a dozen tables

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